EC2 CloudWatch graphs, trends, and alerts

If you're using Amazon EC2, you may be familiar with CloudWatch, Amazon's analytic system that provides metrics on CPU usage, Network I/O, and Disk I/O of your instances. While CloudWatch collects metrics, it doesn't provide a web interface for viewing the metrics, graphs, trending, or alerting.

Enter our Scout EC2 Vloudwatch plugin. Like any other Scout plugin, you can graph the resulting metrics, set triggers, track trends, and get email alerts when the numbers go out of bounds.

What does it monitor?

The CloudWatch plugin captures the following ("measures", as EC2 calls them): NetworkIn, NetworkOut, DiskReadOps, DiskWriteOps DiskReadBytes, DiskWriteBytes, CPUUtilization.

Note, this plugin does not fetch EC2 Load Balancer Metrics, only EC2 instance metrics.

Single Instance, Autoscaling Group, etc.

The EC2 CloudWatch plugin can capture metrics from a single EC2 instance, or it can aggregate metrics across a couple of dimensions. It can aggregate metrics across a given instance type, across all instances launched from a specific image (AMI), or by a specified autoscaling group. That means you can, for example, graph the performance of your application server autoscaling group as a whole, or graph just your memcached instance.

Enabling Cloudwatch

To use this plugin, you have to enable CloudWatch for the instance(s) you want to collect metrics from. See Amazon's CloudWatch docs for details. Basically, it's just ec2-monitor-instances ##### from the command line, or passing a monitoring parameter to the ec2-run-instances. It's covered nicely in Amazon's docs.

New to Scout?

If you're learning about Scout through this plugin, sign up for a trial Scout account to give this plugin a try. You can graph all kinds of metrics and measurements from all your servers. It works with cloud instances, VPS's, and dedicated hardware.